What IS Guitar Theory?

If you’ve been on my email newsletter for any amount of time, or if you’ve been hanging around Guitar Tips Weekly very much, you’ve probably heard me talking about guitar theory at some point or other.

So what IS guitar theory, and how in the world is it going to help us become better guitar players?

After all, at the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to do right? Very few people are interested in learning theory for theory’s sake – certainly not me! However, if learning guitar theory can have a practical application, and if it can help me become a more versatile guitar player, than that is something I want to pursue.

How To Apply Guitar Theory To Your Playing

In this video I’ve give you a very brief introduction to HOW theory can be applied to the guitar. I used the A Major diatonic scale pattern as a starting point, and then showed how you can give each note in the scale a number. Each number then becomes the root note for a chord in that key, and by using bar chords, we can relate chords directly to each note in that scale.

So hopefully you can see that very quickly we can build from a simple scale to finding all the relevant chords in a given key, as well as all the notes we’ll need for soloing! The further you dig into guitar theory, the more you begin to see how it all fits together in a very logical manner. Most importantly, by understanding guitar theory, you can apply it ‘on the fly’ while you’re playing!

In the video I also mention my Unlocking the Guitar combo pack, which includes both my Unlocking I IV V course and my Guitar Scale Patterns course. Going through those lessons will give you a very good foundation in guitar theory, and they’re packed with useful examples and ways that you can begin using these concepts in your playing.